Authors Haruki Murakami and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have been named on TIME 100, the publication’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Yoko Ono commented on Murakami designation. Here is an excerpt:
He deserves the honor. He is a writer of great imagination and human sympathy, one who has enthralled millions of readers by building fictional worlds that are uniquely his. Murakami-san has a singular vision, as informed by pop culture as it is by deep channels of Japanese tradition. And he’s a Japanese writer—while Murakami-san spends much of his time in the U.S. and has earned acclaim internationally, he and his books are very much a product of Japan.”
Radhika Jones commented on Ngozi Adichie’s addition to the list. Here is an excerpt:
It’s the rare novelist who in the space of a year finds her words sampled by Beyoncé, optioned by Lupita Nyong’o and honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. But the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is just that sort of novelist. A MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, Adichie writes of the complex aftermath of Nigeria’s colonial history and her nation’s rise to prominence in an era when immigration to the West no longer means a one-way ticket.